An artificial environment would be ideal, but it's currently impossible. The issue is: how do we recreate the environment with the right organisms? How do we kn

An artificial environment would be ideal, but it's currently impossible. The issue is: how do we recreate the environment with the right organisms? How do we know that they're all growing like they would in their natural environment? I remember in an environmental micro lab, one of our exercises was to grow a newly 'cultivable' bacterium. For a while, it had been considered uncultivable, and all research was done in the field. There had been a breakthrough at the time, though, that let us actually culture this one species in the lab. We used the technique outlined here: http://www.northeastern.edu/adc/publications/Lewis2010JAReview.pdf http://www.northeastern.edu/adc/publications/Lewis2010JARevi... It took us about a week to set up the proper environment and rig a filtration system to approximate the right conditions. A quarter of the class couldn't even get the bacteria to show up after all of that work. (And that was with detailed instructions!) Bottom line: figuring out growth conditions for novel species is hard, especially with the relatively mysterious archaebacteria. Until this decade, the primary way of growing them was to see what showed up on a petri dish with a generic broth. The reason this pit (and others) is crucial is that it holds tons of unidentified bacteria, bacteria that probably wouldn't survive transportation to a controlled environment. We only know they're there because of the bits of DNA we've recovered from dead organisms. Without knowing what we were trying to recreate, our class wouldn't have been able to carry out our controlled experiment. The same probably holds true for the organisms in this pit.